Find that maidenhead grid locator for an address

Contacts, Misc

At Finding Grid Square Locators last August I listed a few sites I used to find maidenhead grid squares for call signs I made a contact with. Having the grid square is important to me as I enter it in my log to show the distance between me and the contact as well as plot those contacts on a map.

One of the most useful was the QRZ Gridfinder application. I could enter an address and it would do a great job of finding the grid locator for that address. Doing it by address is useful for those contacts on QRZ that get pulled into my log that haven’t provided a grid locator in their info. That QRZ Gridfinder app hasn’t worked since the latest QRZ.com site redesign back around the end of 2008. With it not working, I was going through a set of web pages to find a lat/long for an address and then convert that lat/long into a grid square.

When I posted recently asking if anyone was going to address that useful site feature and try to get it working again, someone posted an alternative to use until the page gets fixed (assuming it gets fixed at all). The alternative is using a site I’ve previously used for APRS. If you go to http://aprs.fi and if necessary provide your call sign as a login, you can enter in the address you want in the text entry address box on the right side of the map page and press search. It does a good job at finding the location. I usually just copy/paste the address from QRZ for the callsign I contacted and paste it in. More often then not it finds the address, but in some cases, you need to trim DX address info if it doesn’t know the specific street address, but it gets you close enough.

Once the address is found, you need to move your mouse over map point that is placed. The upper left corner of the map will show the lat/long and grid square of where your cursor is. Move your cursot (+ sign) over the bottom point of the map pin and you’ll have the grid locator.

I’ve asked if the site owner would consider adding the grid location to the pop-up bubble window that is shown when it finds the address and adds the map point. That would make it even easier and more exact if that enhancement is considered and added.

73,
K2DSL

6 thoughts on “Find that maidenhead grid locator for an address”

  1. Dears, I have a problem, My Locator EL95us is no correct. How I find this ??.
    My Latitud is 25.45.3925 N. and my Longitud is
    80,19.3435 W.
    Many Thanks for your help Jose AF4IF
    I appreciate your help

  2. Jose, Thanks for providing some feedback. I’ll follow this up with an email to you as well. I’m not sure of what your issue is at the moment.

    If I go to http://www.levinecentral.com/ham/grid_square.php and enter in your call sign, it comes back with your address from QRZ and then looks up that address on Google. It finds the address on Google and determines your grid square to be EL95us which also matches what QRZ.com has for your grid locator.

    Are you indicating that based on your address in QRZ you are not in grid square EL95us? What information is telling you that you should be in a different grid square?

    If you zoom in on the Google map, is it showing the map point at your location properly or is Google picking a different address then where you actually live?

    73,
    K2DSL

  3. I cannot address the problem of AF4IF, but while the google map associated with my call on QRZ.com states the correct address, the location pointer on that map is off by about half a mile in a north-by-northnorthwesterly direction. My QTH is a few yards south of Gray Road, not several hundred north.

    Something else is odd about that map: When zooming in, the google map identifies a part of Gray Road as ‘Park Road’. In the reality of my location, that one is still called ‘Gray Road’…

    Thus my advice: take the location pointers on google maps at QRZ as some vague hint for a QTH’s real location being somewhere in the vicinity of the maps point indicated only.

    73, KB2YVC

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